There is no secret that PHP Development is not so cool technology, as it was 15 or even 10 years ago. On the one hand, Java and .NET dominate in enterprise area, and on the other hand there are many modern MVC frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django/Python, node.js, etc.) are used widely by startups at line of simplicity and lightness. PHP had lack of their cool features as both the programming language and the web development platform. You even may think that PHP was stuck in 2000. Let’s look at Laravel [http://laravel.com] — modern MVC framework for rapid PHP Development.

Laravel is the best PHP MVC framework

Laravel is not the first MVC framework available for PHP Development (Zend, Yii, Symphony, etc.), but looks like it was created to be the best one.

The popularity of PHP is now far out of the question. This technology appeared to be used in over 200 million websites.

The origin of PHP (Personal Home Page) lies in hands of Rasmus and is dated around 1995. You can even download the very first version of PHP from the internet museum with the same name. It won’t take much time since the weight of it is merely 26 Kb.

The list of further action taken for PHP development includes the access to databases (PHP2), the hypertext abilities (PHP3) and s lot more. The third version finally somewhat resembled the program we know now.

The creation of Zend engine and further PHP development

It took place in 2000 as the next step in order to create codebase and appropriate solutions to the current IT situation in those days. These new features were taken into consideration in PHP4 and led to serious changes in web application programming. The performance appeared to be far better than it has been before.

Let’s consider the tools made to ease your PHP outsourcing.

One of the most popular ones appeared to be Apache Maven. It’s the best choice for those who uses Java. Here you will get all the functions of the dependency manager and even more, still it won’t be cozy in case of using this program for several projects at once as it might appear to be overcomplicated. Some might think about it as the result of lacking experience of the PHP developers team, still it’s mostly because of not too attractive tools.

PEAR is yet another nice option; still you will need some external libraries for it as well. The well known composer project is nice solution as it can be the real salvation for most of dependency problems. Still it’s not actually fully developed yet, so is not exactly reliable. Perhaps we need some more time to decide there.

Symphony2 is a nice way of PHP application development offering a creative approach and having deps file for definition of where the dependencies are. The program is rather light and easy-to-use. Feel free to extend it any way you find suitable.

Things you need to know

As the popularity of Symphony2 is growing constantly, a lot of attention is still paid to GitHub. However this project is not always working in fully correct way as far as I had discovered. For example I had one of the bundlers to fail and smash down all the integration efforts in a moment.

Usually the project needs the definite support to work correctly, mostly if it involves frameworks. There are many libraries in the open source nowadays; they definitely help to save the time. However the new problem appears about dependencies management. Here we offer some thoughts about the ways of salvation by using so called DLL Hell.

Nearly each PHP team uses management tools with the external references to SVN and Git. Still they mostly suit for device management, but not quite for dependencies. They can be forced into this action but sooner or later they will definitely fail. You won’t avoid it no matter what you do for PHP outsourcing; now let me prove my point of view.

Systems for version control

svn:externals was one of the most popular systems for SVN for the past few years. git submodule was the one usually used for GIT. The vey first problem we had to face in our PHP application development was that both programs were only able to support the same type of given referencing repositories. That was the reason GIT appeared to be rather dependent in the current SVN project. Today it will become the real problem, while most people already tend to use GitHub instead of SVN.

The software development can now be aspect-oriented. This is completely new approach to the well known things mostly known among the business application php developers. The aspects offer the leading note here. Pay attention to them while choosing the options. Let’s consider the aspects we can meet in web design in order to see the main idea of each one.

The structure of the site is usually defined by the architecture of the information. Site’s friendliness is what shows the level of the usability while the visual perception can be seen in the graphics design. The business logic is mostly about the functional model. Here are the basics of PHP web development with various resources and unique solutions needed for each component. The effectiveness of all the components is a great guarantee of the success for your project. Sure thing the glory won’t be grated but your chances will surely raise much. AOP is just not able to get rid of any single bug or to act like a living PHP developer. Moreover you shall understand from now on that this approach is not going to be the leading one in the future. It has been used for 20 years already still there are a lot of people preferring to use the procedural code. Still if you consider the possible advantages, object oriented programming is much better then the procedural one.

The future of the PHP 6 development

was planned and appeared to be rather significant. Finally the agreement was successfully reached within the group of the PHP Internals. They decided to choose the PHP 6 as the main target instead of the PHP 5.3 that is already very popular as well.

This was am interesting shift that managed to draw the attention of the php developers all over the world. The main focus on the PHP 6 was usually because of the Unicode-compliant engine that was the part of the language itself. Still for the last months the development of the PHP 6 was rather slow, and that was what made the people question if the decision was the correct one.

Many PHP programmers tend to use particularly this language for the definite reason. Here we offer the benefits of the PHP comparing to the other IT languages.

- Not enough features in the PHP.
The PHP language is primary centered for Web needs. So the basic complains are coming from the lack of features that are not needed for the web.

- The PHP doesn’t provide the support that is object oriented.
The tendency to decline the language because of the lack of OOP support is rather old-fashioned. In the modern PHP you will not HAVE to use any of the objects at all.

The developers tend to constantly search for the ways of how to debug the code for the web pages. The wide range of techniques created for debugging are helpful. Still here we offer the basic five tips that are already proven as the most effective ones. They also let you do make the – coding much faster; all of them are tested and approved.

PHP debugging in live.

The PHP developers are free to use the inbuilt editor for the debugging process. Some of then will not let you make the debugging in live mode, so you will need to open the browser for the correct work. If you write the needed command, the errors will be reported in the line. This can also help with eliminating the small human errors in the code.

Xdebug and its profit.

The error messages such as function traces or stack traces created while the PHP programming, can be easily found by Xdebug. This application will help you to protect the code. The special debug client can run the protection in the interactive mode.

We come to the thought about the PHP being the best language possible, still what can we say about the other languages here?

PHP vs ASP

There’s no way you can count ASP as the real language. This is basically the Active Server Pages, where many languages are usually used. It’s used mostly on the base of the Microsoft platform. This puts the definite limits to it, so it’s available on the Win32 servers. There are several projects that are based on the ASP. This language is definitely slower and has fewer functions. Still if you’re common to some language, you can easily use the ASP. You can also get support from the IIS. Still most of the components are basic, so if you’re up to using something more complicated, opt for buying additional features.

PHP vs ColdFusion

Most people think PHP is faster then the other language. That is why it’s more suitable for complicated tasks and open to new ideas. Moreover it’s significantly more stable and reliable. The ColdFusion had better protection from errors as well as the options for search – however the specialists of the PHP web programming come to the thought the language shall not focus too mush on something like the search engine. The other benefit of the PHP is the ability to be performed no most of the platforms, while ColdFusion is available only on the list of basic ones like MacOS or Windows or some more. ColdFusion doesn’t require much knowledge, on the other hand the results available there are limited.

The level of the knowledge needed for the successful PHP development is really high, as the technology is now improving rapidly. Here we offer the quick overview over the latest trends in this field. Let’s see what solutions appeared to be the best through the last five years.

The main platforms for the web development. The following technologies appeared to be finally selected: JAVA, PHP, Python, ASP, C#, .NET, ColdFusion, Perl and Ruby. These applications appeared to be the most successful and worth our attention of the PHP development.

The basic trends and demands

It was natural for JAVA and .NET to appear one of the most general technology items in the PHP development. About 3,5% web solutions are made through it, while JAVA obtains about 3% of them. Some developments of the applications not linked to the net are also taken into account. A bit less then half of the applications have to do something with web, others are client or server oriented. Still all of them are really close to each other.